When I was 17, living in a student dorm in Berkeley, I had a very important dream. In it,

I walk into an amphitheater filled with women in long robes. I take a seat across the aisle from the leader, who then walks up to the dais and addresses the crowd. She says that today they have a very special guest speaker, and calls me up to speak! I panic, feeling sick to my stomach. I tell her there must be some mistakeâ€”I have nothing to say. I don’t even know their language!

Then the lecture is over. There is a long table set up by the door, filled with books on every esoteric and practical subject I want to learn more about, and I work my way through the crowd to get closer. But there are too many people milling about, and try as I might I can never reach the table.

I woke from this dream feeling tremendously saddened, almost cursed. Here I was in Berkeley, a place teeming with new schools of thought and ancient wisdom traditions, hoping to find a teacher and mentor. I wanted to live a spiritual life, wanted to figure out who I was and what I could be in the world. And in the midst of my yearning my dream was telling me that I would not find a teacher, or even find through books what I wanted to learn. That morning, I understood that it was through my own life experience that I would gain wisdom, if it was mine to gain.

This was a harsh lesson to get at such a tender age, but it was true. Feeling alone and without guidance forced me to fall back on my intuition, which has been my most reliable guide even when I was studying with very capable teachers. And when things ended or fell apart, the dream reminded me that the teacher wasn’t the most important thing, it was how I learned from the experience that mattered.

I recount this story not to say that elders are something we do or don’t need, but to hopefully reframe the issue somewhat. Deep spiritual loneliness is a major part of being a seeker, whether we live five miles from the nearest paved road or five minutes from the wisest mystic in the land. It is not something we should avoid or despair about, it is simply an existential truth: we are all alone, and while sometimes we will be filled with Spirit, at other times we will be completely empty.

It is at those empty times that we have the opportunity to deepen our own connection to the Life Force. We need to bring energy up from the earth and down from the heavens even if we don’t feel it; we need to trust in our own power, even when we have none. If we skitter around looking for something outside ourselves in those moments, we miss the most important lessons that are being offered to us.

That being said, we are social creatures. We desire and need connection with others who share our values and interests, which brings us back to the issue of what to do when you live very far away from the nearest teacher, or circle, or group.

I am a big fan of the “whatever works” school of problem-solving. I have seen lots of people find different solutions to the quandary of living hours away from everyone else (and spent years in that position myself). None of their work-arounds were convenient or ideal by any means, but they did them until they found something better to do.

We do what we need to do, for as long as we can keep doing it. This applies to elders just as much as it applies to anyone else. And while it is no doubt useful to address the pros and cons of the choices we make in order to connect, I hope that in doing so we do not lose sight of the gold that our current situation offers us in every moment.